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Readers must become interrogators of the varied racial implications of any early modern text and must also inquire into how audiences (then and now) might have construed and recognized the concept of race and its linguistic inflections.
-Margo Hendricks,
"Race and Shakespeare Studies: Is There a Future"1
IN SHAKESPEARE STUDIES' first Forum centered on race nearly twentyfive years ago, the Forum's editor asked a question that has become something of a refrain in premodern critical race studies (PCRS) over the past two decades: Does early modern race studies have a future? Perhaps it does, given the fact that now more than two decades since that 1998 Forum, PCRS work graces the pages of the fiftiethanniversary volume of Shakespeare Studies. And this work does so at a time when we can now take measure of how trailblazing studies by Kim F. Hall, Peter Erickson, Margo Hendricks (the 1998 Forum editor), Virginia Vaughan, Patricia Parker and Ania Loomba, among others-who were themselves inspired by the pioneering work from the 1960s through the 80s, by Eldred Jones, Elliot Tokson, Errol Hill, Anthony Barthelemy and others-have led to decades more of early modern race scholarship. The field has seen robust growth since the turn of the century, but still this question about the future and what it looks like remains important to consider. Too often PCRS scholarship goes uncited, and sometimes intentionally, at a time when many scholars are considering and pursuing race work in new directions.2
We inhabit a society that almost reflexively equates race with indigeneity, Blackness and brownness. The "future" question, like white queer theory's embrace of "no future" (at least once upon a time in the wake of the AIDS epidemic), betrays a very commonsensical anxiety about all these "Black" lives, whether in the archives or the streets, and whether something we dream of as "human life" awaits us-that is if we dare let on that we even dream of having a future at all.3 The question nags at many brown, Black, Indigenous Shakespeare scholars, too. This nagging happens because we know, indeed, we experience, the unwavering willfulness of the vast majority of white Shakespeare scholars, who not only insist even now on delimiting real race (quiet as it is kept) to Black people and...